OK, after yesterday’s sloth-fest, I kicked it into gear, beginning work today at 8:30 and plowing through all of the remaining poetry submissions in the Inch submissions manager.  A small handful that we liked and were considering had been pending for entirely too long, a disservice to the authors that I hope not to repeat now that the graduate work is finished.  (Our new intern Jordan has been diligently learning the ropes, and shows such a keen eye for fiction that I hope he’ll stick around as a reader even after the summer is up: Bill and I have five fiction submissions left to discuss and we’ll be ready to send fiction contracts, as well.)  I also filled this week’s orders, sent a care package to a friend who is home with her family, and got five submissions of my own out into the wild.  So, it was a massively productive morning.  Clearing those tasks off my plate has me feeling much more mentally prepared for the day job tomorrow… a feeling I did not have at any point last week, when I stumbled through the workweek with a groggy sense that I didn’t belong anywhere near that office.

But the real triumph of the day was mowing the lawn.  Longtime– and I do mean longtime– readers may remember that my most transcendent moments all seem to occur when I’m mowing the lawn, be they revelations about where my life is headed or 70’s porn moments.  (Man, I wish I had not lost all the blog comments when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress… some of the comments accompanying that latter entry were pure gold.)

I hadn’t mowed my own lawn in over a year, since I discovered early last summer that the mower had died.  I honestly don’t recall how I managed to make it through last summer, but this summer I was paying the same guy that mowed for my next door neighbor.  Until, that is, one of the kids from the neighborhood offered to mow for me.  He’s a good guy– I had met him through Lisa– but a total stoner.  I never had any way to contact him, so when the lawn was hilariously overgrown, he’d appear a couple days later.  He would borrow lawnmowers from whoever he could borrow from, and a couple of times he asked me for a raise from $25 to $30, which is what I had been paying him all along (so I always agreed and let him think he was getting a raise).  He would sometimes bring a stoner friend; occasionally I would bring him dinner.  When I found out he was 21, which completely shocked me since I assumed he was 16, I would sometimes hang out and drink a beer with him on the front stoop when he’d finished.

Just before residency, he came by late at night (did I mention he never began mowing before 8:30 PM?) and couldn’t finish the whole yard before it got too dark, so he left the side yard unmowed and said he’d get it in the morning.  I went ahead and paid him since I was leaving in the morning, but when I got back into town, the lawn looked decidedly overgrown in that area.  He came by Wednesday night, late once again, and finished only the front yard (though he did manage to mow an X into the back yard… why that happened, I cannot be entirely sure).  I paid him when he said he’d be back in the morning, but as of this morning, it was still looking pretty rough.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, I’ve been outwitted twice by the neighborhood stoner.  So, cognizant that spending another $30 would likely get no more than a small swath of my lawn cut– I would suspect that he was conditioning me to expect less and less, until he could one day ring the bell and have me just hand him thirty bucks, saying “See you in a couple weeks,” but seriously, the kid is a mad stoner and I just don’t think there’s enough guile there to undertake a summer-long program of conditioning– I finally got my mower up and running, a process which proved much easier than I had envisioned, and spent an hour puttering around that lawn, choking the mower almost to death in the thick patches that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time.

It’s a little thing, chopping up the grass on a patch of land that you own (or that your wife owns and allows you to manicure).  And it’s a little thing, finishing a job left undone by your neighborhood stoner.  But for about an hour this afternoon, I felt like the returning conqueror, like the hero in a late-night western, like the king of the fucking world.

Wow.  Little Fury lay fallow for over a month, the longest such dry spell since I started blogging in 2002.  Thanks to each of you who sent puzzled notes asking when it would be regularly updated again… you can now resume wasting valuable work time here, instead of surfing for Internet pr0n.

I just finished up my first radio appearance in a long, long time as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things.   Producer Susan Davis, host Frank Stasio, and the rest of the production team do a really terrific job; from start to finish I was amazed at how effortless they make it seem.  I was on with Michael McFee to talk about The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, and literary life in Durham.  Sitting in their new studios in the American Tobacco Complex, it’s hard not to be struck by how thoroughly Durham is in the throes of being revitalized, of growing into a truly exceptional place to live and work.

Assuming that I’m able to complete this last stretch, I graduate on July 12, which has been part of the reason for my silence.  I am now assembling a class and preparing for two thesis interviews.  I’m not sure why I have chosen to focus more of my energy and grey matter on these two tasks than I did on most of the rest of the semester, but friends, I tell you, they have eaten up just about all of my spare bandwidth.  I often feel like I’m not myself for days on end.  But I suppose that these two tasks are the first where I’ve been really beholden to my classmates, and I feel the weight of that responsibility quite keenly.  If I am to leave Warren Wilson with a sense of peace, I’ll have to feel like I knocked these two tasks out of the park.  (As an aside, I am also working with Lili Flanders on the fundraising for the graduating class gift to Friends of Writers.   Though wehave publicly stated that we really want 100% of the grads to participate, we’ve been a little more subdued about our other goal.  But I’ll put it out there, commit it to print: We don’t just want to contribute more than any class before us, we want to shatter the record, setting the bar so high for future classes that they will hire professional fundraisers.  We want the Holden Minority Scholarship endowed now.  If you are a loved one and you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider a donation– the donation form is on the FOW website– in honor of the Summer ‘08 grads.)

So I expect the blogging will be slow a while longer, though since Ladybug is currently in Turkey, I have a little more bachelor time.  I don’t think any man wants to receive e-mail updates from his wife, half a world away, about coed naked massage, but that’s the state of my inbox right now…

Tonight

Dean Young reads at the UNC-G Faculty Center on College Ave. in Greensboro.  8 PM.  Dean is the author of several books of poems, including Embryoyo and Primitive Mentor.

Tomorrow Night

I’ll be reading with Ellen C. Bush, Jon Leon, Alyssa Wolf, David Bradshear, and Henry Kearney at Flanders 311, 311 W. Martin St. in downtown Raleigh.  7 PM.  Come on by and see the prints that go with the poems as part of The Illustrated Word, which runs all month at the gallery.

I haven’t felt like blogging a great deal the last few days. Perhaps it was the post-packet sigh of relief, in which I just didn’t do much of anything for about two days. Perhaps it was the stunning pain of UNC’s loss in the Final Four or the Carolina Hurricanes missing the playoffs by a nose. Some of it may be general sloth, to which I am prone.

But I’ve not been completely dead and gone– in the past couple days, I have read over manuscripts, some for Bull City Press and some for friends who honor me by caring about my opinion at all (and who didn’t even know that, as I work on my own manuscript, this was a tremendous exercise and help). I’ve worked on the next issue of Inch, which has seemed, at times, cursed and is now two weeks late. I read all nine books of the terrific series Preacher (I’d read it before, but I needed it). I taught a poetry class at UNC, a bright and very talented group (usually when you sub for someone, you hear in advance how great the students are and then when you arrive, they’re just like everyone else, but this class actually seemed well above average). I went to the opening of The Illustrated Word at Flanders 311 in downtown Raleigh, where I’ll have a reading this Friday at 7 PM in conjunction with the exhibit. And I’ve spent a lot of social time with poets and friends and worst of all, poet-friends– the most dangerous kind of friend known to man.

See? Not all wasted. I’ve tried, since finishing this first draft of my manuscript and loosing it into the world (well, to three people), to not think about manuscript. Which has meant that I haven’t really thought about my own work during that time. And that’s been nice. But the vacation is over.

Rather than issue any apologies of my own for my selfish disregard for myself, I offer what should be the last Olena Kalytiak Davis poem that I post in this blog, lest Ms. Davis start thinking that I am hoping to cannibalize her book sales:

Six Apologies, Lord

 

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I,
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.
Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am
Accountable. Lord.

Lord It Over Me,
Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir,

In This My Mouth.

Check this out, boys and girls… an upcoming exhibit featuring Bull City Press author Ellen C. Bush, managing editor Marielle Prince, and me… plus our pals Henry Kearney and Zena Cardman.

Please consider coming to the reading on April 11, which features me and Ellen.

“The Illustrated Word” at Flanders 311

Raleigh, NC - Flanders 311 will present “The Illustrated Word,” an exhibition that pairs North Carolina writers and printmakers together to produce specially commissioned illustrations. There will be an opening reception on First Friday, April 4, from 6:00-9:00 p.m. This exhibit will run through Wednesday, April 30.

In a study of collaborative creativity, North Carolina authors were invited to compose and submit one-page pieces - either poetry or prose - which were then assigned to printmakers throughout the state to illustrate. Each illustration was conceived and completed for the purpose of this exhibition and will be unavailable for viewing alongside the accompanying text in any other venue.

The printmakers faced the challenge of keeping true to their own individual styles while also complementing the tone of their respective written pieces. To undertake this task, many participants entered into prolonged discussions with one another to comprehend and determine crucial themes and details worth emphasizing from the works. “The Illustrated Word” references the rich literary and artistic traditions of illustration, but it sets itself apart by removing the mass production element common to most efforts.

As an added event to “The Illustrated Word,” a poetry reading will occur on Friday, April 11, at 7:00 p.m. It will feature recitations by Ross White, Jon Leon, Allyssa Wolf, Ellen Bush, David Bradsher, and Eric Amling. All events are free and open to the public.

Selected books and collections by the participating authors will be available for sale on the opening night, at the poetry reading, and throughout the span of the exhibition.

Participating writers include Eric Amling, Jane Andrews, David Bradsher, Ellen C. Bush, Zena Cardman, Joe Fletcher, Henry Kearney, Carrie Knowles, Tom Lisk, Jon Leon, Ruth Moose, Lawrence Naumoff, Ryan Nilsen, Elaine Orr, Marielle Prince, Maria Rouphail, Christopher Salerno, Ross White, and Allyssa Wolf. Participating printmakers include Owen Beckmann, Daniel Chapin, Andy Farkas, Louise Zjawin Francke, John Gall, Annemarie Gugelmann, Judy Jones, Delia Keefe, Carrie Knowles, Michael Meadors, Mary Mendell, Kristianne Ripple, and Lisa Beth Robinson.

Flanders 311 is located in the Martin Street Galleries and Studios on 311 West Martin Street in downtown Raleigh. Regular gallery hours run 11 a.m.- 6 p.m., Tues - Sat. For more information, contact a gallery representative at 919-834-5044 or visit www.flandersartgallery.com.

Image details: John Gall, He Will Make It Grow. Line and stippled etching on zinc with chine colle, 2008, 10.5 x 8″

Matthea Harvey, in her Poetry Foundation interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey, pretty much summed up why I love working on Inch:

When something is tiny, maybe the little arrows of heartbreak penetrate more easily—slip in through a tear duct or a pore.

Harvey has always seemed the poetic equivalent of Matthew Barney– you can see the mechanical and pop-cultural influences roiling beneath the surface but the finished product is an otherwordly beauty that cannot be captured simply in (or on) those terms.

One of the occasional joys of running a small press is getting an excited e-mail from a customer about one of your books.  I had exchanged e-mails earlier in the week with a woman who said that she had been waiting a long time and hadn’t received a book we’d shipped a while ago.  My policy in those cases is to send another one in the next day’s mail– I’m sure that this has meant that the customer ended up with two copies the few times it’s happened, but if first class mail takes more than about 10 days to deliver, I’m assuming something went wrong.  So I wrote back immediately to this woman and told her I’d put a replacement in the mail the next day, but before I went to the post office in the morning, I had a note saying that it was a false alarm and the book had just arrived.

About three hours later, the same woman wrote back a wonderful note complimenting the book, and asked for a catalog.

I get feedback about books in person, but it doesn’t happen too often that I hear back by e-mail from customers.  I put my card in every order, and confirm all e-mail orders from my personal account… that’s really more so they can report any problems, like damage in shipping, etc.  But when someone takes the time to send a personal note about how much they enjoyed a book, it means more than the sales.  It really does.

Keep supporting small presses.

But I can’t talk about it yet. ARRR! Want to talk about it!

The terrifying Marielle Prince shows up in Poemelion’s new issue, out today. This issue is all prose poems… rock! (Also features Jeannine Hall Gailey.)

Though I’m not sure Bill, Jeremy and I have come close to mastering it yet, Inch is now using an electronic submissions manager. This should make it much easier for cheapskate poets to send us high-quality work.

This may sound like I’m being snarky, but I’m serious when I say I know a couple of terrific poets who are complete and utter cheapskates. But I’d go to great lengths to get some of their work in our little magazine.

I don’t know why the majority of today seemed rotten. I think it started early, when I checked my morning e-mail and found some very unwelcome news; I just felt like I’d committed a serious social faux pas even though the missteps were unintentional, probably harmless, and hopefully easily forgivable. Couldn’t shake that feeling after I got to work, where I stared at my to-do lists and felt a little helpless; I would have been happier today chasing the instant gratification of answering every e-mail as it came in, but not many e-mails came in. I spent some time tinkering with non-work stuff, figuring that if I could get any mojo at all, I’d just make up the time tomorrow when I take a writing day. No dice.

I think I started the paragraph above intending to come to some moral or cathartic thought, but now I can’t remember what it is. Rats.

Oh, yeah, here’s what it was: throughout the day, the only thing that made me feel like a normal human being was reading a manuscript by this guy. It’s freaking terrific. I can hear his teacher’s voice behind a few of the poems, nudging them into where they want to go. There’s an unexpected authority in some. It’s heartening.